Poetry

A poetic exploration that reimagines form and language through celestial patterns

Informed by mystery, chaos, order and writing as container, A Winter Triangle explores poetic space and form amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or "points," like its namesake asterism, this collection is inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's idea of composing poetry from the "senseless splendor" of the skies as well as the designs for automata by 12th-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

Inventing a new poetic form, the septentrional, which trembles in its own process of becoming throughout the length of the book, Marcella Durand questions the potential of poetry in the face of artificial intelligence, climate change, and political turbulence in which language is often twisted into the opposite of its own meaning. By counting the seven syllables of the septentrional, and opening spaces (caesura) within the poetic line to provide breath and rejuvenation amid exhausting world events, these poems resituate poetry as an alternate space in which to reimagine the given forms of constellations and how we imagine order out of seeming chaos. Thus the question is opened as to whether the poet may ever make sense of the "senseless splendor" of the skies, or simply convey them as they are through poetry, holding the infinite within the finite, for a time.

Durand reads the "dustlike" script of the calligraphic galleon, a ship created entirely out of words, as art and struggles to understand the burning Wolf/Dog star which stands between law and lawlessness. Is there actual connection between stars in the constellations we have invented? Can we find room for composition within the broken loops of infinity? At the point between old and new, bow and arrow, chaos and order, A Winter Triangle asks us to face the overwhelm of change—self-inflicted, invented, planetary and real.

A collection of poems spanning six decades of life, love, loss, and rebellion amidst the planetary transformations of the working class and capital, from the acclaimed Marxist philosopher and writer George Caffentzis.

"I have never considered myself a poet, yet, from my adolescence, poetry has been a constant company in my life. Only recently, however, I have begun to collect poems that I had scattered through notebooks, back-pages of articles and other occasional spaces. The desire to see them as one work is partly stimulated by the recognition of recurring themes, at times in syntony with those inspiring my political writings. Among them are the memories and the nostalgia for the Greek world of my childhood, my grandmother's house facing the Taygetus mountain, the pleasures and troubles of love and political organizing, and, with the passing of years, the mourning of dead friends and comrades, and above all the never-ending pleasure of playing with words. This book collects some of the poems that have accompanied this journey." —George Caffentzis, from the Introduction

Fonograf Editions’ first ever magazine FE builds off the genre-defining work it has released since 2016.

FE includes new material from Catherine Bresner • Suzanne Buffam • Arda Collins • Joel Craig • Michael Earl Craig • Corinne Dekkers • Mark Anthony Cayanan • Anaïs Duplan • Claire Donato • Peter Gizzi • Yam Gong (trans. Dorothy Tse and James Shea) • Brandi Katherine Herrera • Emily Hunerwadel • Federico Italiano (trans. Brenda Porster) • Krystal Languell • Nathaniel Mackey • Veronica Martin • Kristi Maxwell • Joyelle McSweeney • Ryan Mills • Alice Notley • Alexis Orgera • Gabriel Palacios • Andre Perry • Justin Phillip Reed • Joshua Pollock • Harper Quinn • Rachelle Rahmé • Megan Savage • Zach Savich • Mary Szybist • Nick Twemlow • Jan Verberkmoes • Jeffrey Yang and CL Young.

A rich anthology of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry on the beauties and perils of the hunt

In the poems of Fate the Hunter, many of them translated into English for the first time, trained cheetahs chase oryx, and goshawks glare from falconers’ arms, while archers stalk their prey across the desert plains and mountain ravines of the Arabian peninsula. With this collection, James E. Montgomery, acclaimed translator of War Songs by ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, offers a new edition and translation of twenty-six early works of hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt. Included here are poems by pre-Islamic poets such as Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Shanfarā, as well as poets from the Umayyad era such as al-Shamardal ibn Sharīk. The volume concludes with the earliest extant epistle about hunting, written by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, a master of Arabic prose.

Through the eyes of the poet, the hunter’s pursuit of the quarry mirrors Fate’s pursuit of both humans and nonhumans and highlights the ambiguity of the encounter. With breathtaking descriptions of falcons, gazelles, and saluki gazehounds, the poems in Fate the Hunter capture the drama and tension of the hunt while offering meditations on Fate, mortality, and death.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Named one of 75 Notable Translations of 2024 by World Literature Today

The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A Whale is a Country explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.

Sonic and typographic experimentation collide in this book-length poem in seven sections. MOTHER IS A BODY is a visceral and immediate exploration of the female body, and that which is continually forced upon it, as Herrera considers what it means to be mothered, and to mother in return.

Through a cyclical process of imagining, conceiving, assigning, emptying, MOTHER IS A BODY at once renounces and reveres the notion of the sacred feminine, to illustrate “mother” in her many actualities — a complex figure, at times unsightly, that both is and isn’t what we most often ascribe to her as an archetype of the divine.

Overseen by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Clarice Lispector, Miriam Medrez, and Yoko Ono, Herrera pieces together material excavated from within Instagram’s endless scroll, Wikipedia’s citations, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s archives to create a layered inscription — musically, emotionally, philosophically — to the idea of motherhood, and the children she never had.

An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination. stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black American contributions to world art, the seed of innovation that never dies.

What becomes of a history overwritten, sampled, celebrated and smeared? How do we find creation past erasure? Part new media archive, part visual poetry project, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] is a journey into highs and lows of Black America’s first global music export. Taking biographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a jumping off point, BIRD/DIZ jumps between actual erasures of the written/oral history of Bebop, redacted poems taken from those words, and reflections on historic performances from some of jazz’s chief characters. From St. Louis heroin dins to Copenhagen sound

We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.

The poems in We Sailed on the Lake are closely observed, finding unexpected affinities within urban and natural environments alike. As one poem states, “to cross the lake / you’ve got to make each step / pertain to the water,” and these poems explore relationality in many forms, moving from gentrifying cities to coastal beaches, from the sculptures of antiquity to YouTube searches, cataloging passing days “of which light is the measure.”

Alternating longer, occasionally narrative poems with short lyrics, this collection plays with time and ideas of promise, from youth to parenthood, noting how the self negotiates the artifices, be they technological or of self-design, that infringe upon reality and experience."

Like A Hammer is an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s incarceration system.

These powerful poems of witness seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing cracks in a criminal punishment system that too often appears unchangeable. The impacts of that system reverberate through lives and across generations. The poets gathered here aim to foreground the real experiences of people touched by the system, to upend dominant narratives, shine light on injustice, and act as a fulcrum around which to organize communities in support of change.

Like A Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a better future.

Contributors include: Hanif Abdurraqib, Rhionna Anderson, Brian Batchelor, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Marina Bueno, Cody Bruce, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Natalie Diaz, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nikky Finney, Kennedy A. Gisege, Gustavo Guerra, Jessica Hill, Vicki Hicks, Randall Horton, Sandra Jackson, Catherine LaFleur, Ada Limón, Sarah Lynn Maatsch, Christopher Malec, Eduardo Martinez, John Murillo, Angel Nafis, Kenneth Nadeau, Leeann Parker, James Pearl, Christina Pernini, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Patrick Rosal, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Sin á Tes Souhaits, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Erica "Ewok" Walker, Candace Williams, and SHE>i

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious. Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

Amal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons), first published in 1945 in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press, was the second volume of poetry produced by the renowned Zulu author B.W. Vilakazi. It was written during the ten years he spent living in Johannesburg, in ‘exile’ from his birthplace, KwaZulu-Natal. The poems in this collection represent a turning point in Vilakazi’s life; they express yearnings for the beloved land, animals and ancestral spirits of his rural home, as well as expressions of deep disillusionment with the urban life he encountered in the ‘City of Gold’, and in particular the suffering of the black miners who brought this gold to the surface but never experienced the benefits of the wealth it produced for the mine owners. Vilakazi was deeply conscious of the subhuman system that held these miners in its grip, and gave voice to their suffering in many of the poems in the collection, in particular the now famous poem ‘Ezinkomponi’ (‘On the mine compounds’).

Renowned as the father of Nguni literature, Vilakazi was both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry). In these poems he assumes the role of the voice of the voiceless, and gives poignant expression to the stoic endurance of those caught up in the brutalities of capitalist exploitation of African labour, and the appalling injustices of the migrant labour system.

Inkondlo kaZulu (Zulu Poems), the first volume of poetry by B.W. Vilakazi, was first published in 1935. This was the first book of poems ever published in isiZulu; it also marked the launch of the newly established Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series (published by the University of the Witwatersrand Press), a collection of twenty classic works written between 1935 and 1987 in African indigenous languages. It contains superb nature poems and also reflects Vilakazi’s contact with Western modernity. As both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry), he used his writings to express his resistance to the realities of capitalist exploitation of African labour and the appalling injustices of the migrant labour system. By committing to writing in poetic form what had traditionally been conveyed orally from one generation to the next, he preserves for future generations deep philosophical and emotional experiences of Zulu society.

The republication of Inkondlo kaZulu affords the reader the opportunity to reappraise Vilakazi’s intellectual significance and his renown as the ‘father of Nguni literature’ at a time when the need is acutely felt to unshackle ourselves from ethnic boundaries and break the invisible chains of inherited prejudice.

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious. Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando

Hubo una edad en que «hicimos todo lo que había que hacer», pero, de pronto, los años se agolparon —no sabemos exactamente cuándo— y una retahíla de vocablos —«ausencia», «desamor», «lejanía»— nos dejó solos con las preguntas: «¿adónde van los días que pasan?» «¿Cuál será el porvenir de mi pasado?».

En Desde entonces —recopilación de poemas publicados entre 1975 y 1978— el verso libre, la prosa poética y el poema extenso dialogan en el gran teatro del mundo que la palabra ha montado, como acto de rebeldía contra el olvido.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

An invaluable legacy that invites us to keep reading, writing, and dreaming

There was an age when "we did everything that had to be done," but suddenly, the years piled up—we don't know exactly when—and a string of words—"absence," "heartbreak," "distance"—left us alone with the questions: "Where do the days that pass go?" "What will be the future of my past?"

In Desde entonces (Since Then)—a collection of poems published between 1975 and 1978—free verse, poetic prose, and the long poem dialogue in the great theater of the world that words have set up, as an act of rebellion against oblivion.

This anthology of over 300 poems brings together America’s diverse spiritual traditions in one volume.